I never wanted sight words to feel like a task to me or my students. I wanted it to be something that we, as a class, understood to be important to help us as writers and readers. With that in mind, I brought in music as just one way to help us learn our sight words.
A new sight word is introduced each week and I have a variety of activities that we do. A lot of these activities are easier to do when teaching in person, but I have been able to adapt them to virtual teaching. One of the first activities I like to do is have my students build or write the sight word and find it in song lyrics. This is a special activity because we get to use highlighters. WE LOVE HIGHLIGHTERS! This is also a great opportunity for me to teach them how to use highlighters and what highlighters are used for.
Here is the process:
After deciding on what our sight word is for the week, I look for a song that is school appropriate and contains our sight word. I print a copy for each student and make a digital copy for our Smart Board. Sometimes I give each table a bag of letters so they can build the word and other times I just have students write the word. I tell students what the sight word is for the week and we work together to find the first few words on the Smart Board. Then I play the song, pass out their lyrics and highlighters, and they go to work. Once I noticed that some students would finish earlier than others, I added the bottom box that asks them about how many of that sight word they found. If there is time, I usually make time, I will teach them a portion of the song- usually the chorus. They keep this lyrics with other lyrics we've worked on, in a folder in their work boxes. My goal is to begin getting everyone a binder so we can keep the lyrics in there.
After we do this with a sight word, if we see that word somewhere else like the morning message, a book, or in another activity, students will recognize that word by singing the song we learned to connect with that song lyric. Once I realized that, I made it a point to always make this an activity when we learn new sight words.
I have also done this activity with poems! Amazing Face by Lee Bennett Hopkins & Chris Soentpiet has a collection of poems that highlight and celebrate the amazing faces of children of different cultures. I used the poem on the right when we learned the sight word me. Since we were virtual at the time, I uploaded this image into Seesaw and had my students highlight the word me and write how many times they found the word.
The cool thing about using different song lyrics and poems is that I can use some of these pieces again for other sight words and students will be familiar with the text.
Another way to incorporate music with sight words is this activity I found called Sing A Sight Word. Depending on the length of the sight word, there are songs that you can sing to spell it out. After doing this with one song, my students began requesting other songs for us to sing to learn how to spell our sight words.
Our literacy curriculum came with sight word flash cards that I use with my students. As we learn a new word, I add it to our deck and we review them every morning.
We also rainbow write our sight words, I purposely incorporate our sight words into our writing, I put them in our morning message, we've done sight word scavenger hunts around the room, write the room with sight words, and a variety of other activities.
Here are a few songs lyrics I have used with the sight words that connect with them:
CAN: "Can You Feel It" by Jackson 5
IN & THE: "Wade in the Water" by Ella Jenkins
WE: "We Shall Overcome" by Mahalia Jackson
MY: "My Power" by Beyonce
THE: "Follow the Drinking Gourd"
ME: "I Love Me" by Meghan Trainor
YOU: "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing" by Stevie Wonder
BE: "Be Ever Wonderful" by Earth, Wind & Fire
My hope is that this inspires you to go on the search for song lyrics and poems that you can use in your classroom or make up your own with your students! Sight words don't have to be just using flashcards- make it fun, make it natural, make it fit your classroom!
Happy Teaching-
The Queendom Teacher
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